


free your ghosts (take me in)

by vorokis



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-08-14 15:03:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20194210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis/pseuds/vorokis
Summary: Vergil has trouble sleeping. The brothers talk about this. Or not-talk.





	free your ghosts (take me in)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frozen_sky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_sky/gifts).

> This is a very belated birthday gift for the very lovely [frozen_sky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_sky/pseuds/frozen_sky) \-- apologies for how late I am, Hel, and I hope it makes up for the wait! <3
> 
> Title is from 'Comatose' by Sød Ven; the lyrics are "take me in (free your ghosts)," just swapped around for this fic. There is also a very tiny, lazy reference to the latest VoV chapter -- incredibly easy to catch, I think!
> 
> Spoilers for the fic in the following, but: [Pandora](https://twitter.com/pandora81240809) kindly drew a little something based on this, which you can see [here](https://twitter.com/pandora81240809/status/1167968748944257024). [Faltered](https://twitter.com/Faltered_arts) also kindly drew something based on the final scene, which you can see [here](https://twitter.com/Faltered_arts/status/1168291379279273984). Thank you so much to you both, I'm very blessed and grateful. <3

Dante wakes to the quiet sounds of a sleepy town. The moon spills itself into his room in milky shafts of light he doesn’t need. There’s no such thing as true darkness for someone like him, who sees too much, hears too well. 

A woman’s laughter chimes, muffled by the walls of a house. Someone is singing a song—a lullaby, from the intonation. Further away: the rippling of puddles left over from earlier rain; pawed animals stepping softly; a lone car purring down an empty street. The only thing that warrants his attention is far closer to home, sitting in the room below Dante. A demonic presence that smells ice-sharp and flares glacial, its frost deep enough to scorch like any fire. Vergil. 

Dante leaves the soft entanglement of his blankets. His coat and shirt, belt and boots, make a haphazard trail on the floor where he’d carelessly thrown them a few hours before. He doesn’t bother to reach for the shirt again, walking downstairs, knowing already what he’ll find. 

In the Underworld, they’d leeched energy from the air itself, each breath thrumming with copper-tanged power, but they’d still been too foreign to the land for sleep to lose its siren call. Indulging it only as a strict necessity, they’d dozed in shifts and never for too long. Never any true sort of sleep, merely a brief lingering within the nebulous membrane between consciousness and slumber, something thin and easily severed in the event of a sudden attack. 

Vergil had always slept leaning against something. The base of a fallen tree or the side of a boulder. Against Dante a few times, the lines of their arms pressed together an unbroken road. He’d slept holding the Yamato to him, her sleek body against his heart, resting, guarding, his head turned away, hiding the secrets of his slumbering face.

His demon had only seen opportunity in it, but Dante had been uncomfortable to see it, this—vulnerability. This concession to vulnerability. The air of wrongness about it. The brother he remembered, so deliberate and self-contained, had seemed above normality, removed from the regular, banal necessities that sustained other living animals: an autonomous universe that ran efficiently to its own operations, wanting and needing nothing and no one. 

Back within the human world, Vergil avoids these concessions when he can, like sleep is a demarcated piece of land he can carefully walk around. Dante had noticed only after some weeks. Unsurprisingly, his brother conceals well. The smoothness of his speech doesn’t falter. His motion stays serene. When they spar, he is quicksilver violence measured out in a precise melody. Pure and perfect math. 

It's in fleeting, almost imperceptible moments that the truth slips a shard of itself through. Moments where Vergil's eyes close for a beat too long before snapping open again, full of a sharp, intense awareness as he re-catalogs his surroundings. There are days where he disappears into his room and doesn’t appear for hours, ostensibly desiring privacy. Crashing finally, Dante reckons. 

And then there are nights like tonight, where he finds Vergil sitting on the couch, carved out starkly by moonlight and shadow as if a piece of chiaroscuro artwork escaped from an era long since past. 

He’s barefoot and still in his vest and leather trousers. A book sits on the armrest beside him, but his hand is curled around the Yamato, keeping her against his chest. His eyes are closed. It’s a deceptive image of stillness, harmlessness, when his brother is lightning; the killer who deals death between heartbeats.

There isn’t any danger here, Dante could say, but it would be a lie. There is danger. There is Dante and the demon inside of him that never sleeps and together they have killed Vergil once already.

Hand on the banister, he remains by the stairs for the moment. “You waitin’ up for someone?”

“Not particularly,” Vergil says.

“You just really like that couch?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, either.”

“Sitting in the dark is a favorite hobby of yours, then.” 

“Also no. Any other inanities you’d like to try before you say what you really want to say?”

“Any other time and I'd take you up on that challenge.” Dante makes sure not to tighten his hand around the fragile wood beneath his palm. “You can’t keep staying awake, Vergil,” he says and watches as Vergil opens his eyes at last, looks not at Dante, but at something to the left: nothing at all.

“I’m aware,” he replies. 

Dante knows better than to follow Vergil’s gaze. He does it anyway, tries to see what nightmare Vergil sees, even a hint of it—a distortion in the air, a barely-there silhouette. Anything he could grab, put bullets into. _ Bang_. Justifiable homicide. “When was the last time you’ve really slept.”

“I’ll let you know if I remember,” Vergil says, flatly wry like he’s sharing a joke where only he knows the punchline, and Dante considers all the things Vergil can’t recall now, the incomplete creature he has become, a stranger in parts to himself. 

Remembering is a fraught thing Dante can’t particularly recommend. Can’t particularly prevent, either. It’s an instinct helplessly triggered. A voice too much like his mother’s, a smell too fresh like the courtyard he’d played in as a child, a shade of blue resembling what Vergil had once worn, and then the past comes flooding in, an oppressive sea heaving with dark things, intimate wounds. 

Dante can’t decide if he doesn’t envy Vergil on some level for the ten-year stretch of blank pages in his memory. If it’s selfish and self-absorbed to feel envy at all when Dante’s own memories, even at their bleakest, could never be as bleak as his brother’s. 

“Go back upstairs,” Vergil says. “There’s nothing for you here.” 

“There is,” Dante says and lets Vergil make of that what he will. He moves away from the stairs, crosses the distance to his desk and to the bottle of whiskey he’d placed there. His fingers twitch with need and habit. 

“What are you hoping for? That I’ll cry on your shoulder?”

Dante tries to imagine his brother crying at all. It's difficult. The image resists taking root in his mind. It's only blood Vergil spills, not tears.

“We don’t have to talk,” he says easily enough. Neither of them are men given to it unless the words are steel-wrought and demonic-souled. “Just—” But he doesn’t know what, and silence, heavy with the half-formed skeletons of words he has little idea how to finish, plunges in to fill the cracks left behind. 

Dante hears himself too loudly in it. Hears Vergil just about. His brother breathes so quietly, wisps of sound like the atrophied breath of a ghost. No human would ever hear it. They would only know Vergil is still alive by the faint rise and fall of his chest.

Maybe, Dante thinks, it’s: just don’t push me away. Let me stay.

Or: just let me follow you this time.

Because Vergil still leaves. It’s just not a physical vanishing now, but one that takes him away into his mind. 

Dante knows it by the blankness that comes over Vergil’s face when he’s remembering certain fragments of his own history. It’s distinct from all of Vergil’s other blanknesses. More unsettling to look at: bone meticulously scraped clean of its flesh, peeking out of an otherwise intact, perfect body. There's a clinical distance to his brother as if his horrors are obscurities, existing in a remote, deadened region of himself, something he more spectated than felt.

Sometimes, Dante recalls Vergil’s familiars. A safe, sanitized word for what they actually were: pain made into flesh, walking beside the figure of Vergil’s humanity, tattooed back into his skin like he’d never sought refuge from them in the first place. 

Griffon had said, _ This is our final flight…and the end of Vergil’s nightmares_. 

It doesn’t work like that, of course. There are no solutions so neat, when nothing dies so completely. All bodies, in the end, become haunted houses, sites to exorcisms that never take. For everything Vergil doesn’t remember, there’s plenty he still does. 

“We could go outside, fight a few rounds,” Dante suggests. “Or—” He looks at the whiskey. “But that’s more my thing than yours.” 

Vergil offers no reply. 

Dante looks for some flicker in the still landscape of his brother’s face and catches none. Even if these days find him more willing to humor Dante, Vergil still hasn’t lost the talent he’s always had for taking hot, fluid emotion and turning it hard and cold, inert, the most beautiful crystals there'd ever exist.

Dante grits his jaw. He isn’t accustomed to feeling useless. “Vergil,” he says, a quiet and tight word. He needs something. Anything. “Tell me what I can do.”

“It’ll take time, Dante. I’ve spent too long being chased by one thing or another." Vergil smiles, small, thin, sharp. Dante doesn’t know which one of them it’s meant to cut. "Ironic, isn’t it. A predator living the life of prey.”

An old scar, misshapen, still not entirely healed, groans and creaks in Dante’s chest. There’s still so little he knows about Vergil’s life during those years they were separated. “Nobody’s prey now, brother.”

“No,” Vergil says. “I’m not.” There’s nothing good or kind about the look in his eyes, then. It’s the unsparing gaze of a demon king with power in his veins born from the blood of an innocent world. 

Dante wants that gaze gone. Needs it gone. _See me_, he thinks, seized by abrupt, desperate impulse, closing the rest of the distance between them. _See **me**_. 

Slow enough for his brother to track, Dante raises his hands, cups Vergil's face, tilts it upwards. Moonlight hits Vergil’s silver eyes; they soften into paler mist. Like shadows refusing to retreat, smudges sit beneath his lower lashes. Dante glides his thumbs over them. Says, “You’re right, it'll take time, but who says you gotta spend that time alone?”

Vergil stares at him. He searches Dante's face like Dante is an image that's suddenly come into sharp focus and he can't look away. “Obstinate,” he says. 

“Maybe I got it from you.” 

"That talent is all your own, little brother." 

"I'll remember that," Dante says. "You admitting I do have talents." He puts his thumbs to Vergil’s cheeks next and feels out the terrain of skin he’d thought lost to him. Touching Vergil always feels like dislocated things in Dante finally clicking back into place, cracked apart continents beneath his skin merging once more into a cohesive, immaculate world. It's still surreal, suddenly having this sense of completion again after so many years spent sundered. 

In the hand that Vergil curls around Dante’s wrist, Dante sees an imminent rejection. A tug that will force Dante to let go of his brother, put space back in between them again, but minutes pass and Vergil does nothing but hold on. Then he leans forward. Presses his face into Dante’s stomach. Breathes like this is the first time the whole night he's been able to, warm against Dante's skin, that wisp of a sound, so quiet but so warm, the breath of something alive after all, and Dante learns that heat, too, can make you want to shiver.

He wraps an arm around Vergil’s shoulders, strokes his brother’s hair with the hand of the other. Gradually, the strands come undone, shifting through his fingers like glinting water. Dante feels like a fort. Something built to guard, built to last. Slowly again, he moves forward. Settles right knee, then left, on either side of Vergil’s hips, sliding in to sit astride him, a solid weight on his lap. He waits for a protest. No protest comes. Vergil moves the Yamato and Dante presses in closer. In the back of his mind, in the blood of his body, there’s the stir of vicious instincts that had first bloomed in the Underworld while fighting beside his brother, shielding him, instincts that whisper: _nothing can get through me to you. I’ll never let it. I’ll tear it apart with my bare hands._

When Vergil touches him again, it’s gentle, more like a touch intimated and not actualized, but Dante knows it's real from the quiver that wants to rustle through him. Vergil touches the jut of his hipbones. Slides bit by bit up the branches of Dante’s ribs. These are bones Vergil knows well. Bones that he’d broken at one point or another in their lives. 

"Whatever you need," Dante says, as his breath rises and falls cautiously under his brother’s palms. "Take whatever you need." There is danger here. There is Vergil and the demon that doesn’t need sleep inside of him and their ruthless willingness to raze a world to the ground and salt its earth, and still, when Vergil turns his face into Dante’s neck, his teeth so close to the pulse that he could eat like another forbidden fruit—Dante accepts it. Would even allow it, in this moment. 

“Your scent,” Vergil says.

"Hmm?"

“I thought I caught it once, in the Underworld.”

Dante doesn't understand immediately—and then he does. He closes his oddly warm eyes and keeps them closed 'til he's sure they'll stay dry. It’s impossible, he wants to say. They would’ve known, would’ve sensed each other. Life wouldn’t be so cruel. But it would. It has been that cruel. “I was down there for a while, so maybe…”

“I see,” Vergil says, hollow-voiced like he's going to leave without leaving again, like a part of him's already left. 

Dante follows. "Not tonight. We don't have to have that conversation tonight." He holds on tighter, keeps his brother there, just keeps holding.

And this time, Vergil does stay. "Not tonight," he agrees.

Dante presses his sigh, his relief, into the softness of Vergil’s hair. He traces patterns into his shoulder-blades, small, meandering ones. Tries not to jostle Vergil too much. 

It’s strange to move with such deliberate slowness. To be careful with his brother, to—show care. They don’t do this. They don’t hold each other like this. Like they're on the cusp of slipping into each other, becoming the single entity it used to feel like they already were.

Vergil doesn’t slide his palms from Dante’s ribs and over to his back ‘til his arms are looped around him, but right now, he does, and maybe, Dante thinks, they're having some kind of conversation after all. Maybe this is Vergil speaking to him, with touch as his voice, his fingers shaping out rusted vocabulary. There’s a language here in the meeting of their skin, an old one, exhumed, salvaged, revived from when it had died during their childhood years, when they'd been young enough to believe in something called tenderness. 

So: Dante listens. He listens for a long time, though his knees grow uncomfortable and his legs begin to numb. He looks for the words in the caress of Vergil's lashes against his throat every time Vergil blinks. He searches for the meaning in the heat of Vergil’s breath, the heat of his body, how it's so close that his inhales fill Dante's lungs with air, his heart beats in Dante's chest. The stroke of Vergil's hands are long and lingering. As if to say: _ You’re here_. 

Dante presses his lips to Vergil's temple. Strokes back with his fingers in answer each time._ I’m here_, he says. _ I’m here_. 


End file.
